OT: I wish more funding & development effort went into BEAM itself on making it more performant.
Note: I’m not talking concurrency. I’m talking pure raw performance.
Seems like it’s been a one person show for over a decade on making it faster.
I suspect once the Erlang/OTP team squeezes all performance in the JIT, they will look into optimizing across modules, which will probably open up many new possibilities, but it requires rethinking some runtime primitives.
You’re an inspiration for many. Thank you.
I’m curious to know what your top 3 hopes for BEAM itself are for the coming years (in any area that you think would make it better).
1. The cross module optimizations I mentioned above 2. Have a WASM target for the runtime itself 3. Make it easier to ship single file executables with the whole VM
But they are really “nice-to-have”s. I have been a happy user for 15+ years!
Knowing what I know now, I would’ve tried to push for a threaded interpreter to get rid of the runtime overhead of dispatching altogether. I don’t know if they’ve changed the architecture of that module much since I left :-)
You can get substantial performance improvements by using guards though. See what Wings3D does with is_float() everywhere in hot numeric-heavy code.
Other JITS like V8 will do things like speculative inlining and inserting its own type guards , but if this JIT is "Admittedly an extremely simple one" then it presumably doesn't do much of that.